Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I’ve taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I’ve chased South Africa’s first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso’s grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault. I’ve edited the magazine’s Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

9/01/2011 @ 5:59PM3,193 views

Leadership Lessons from the Mob and Mother Teresa

We get piles of leadership books sent to us here on the Forbes leadership team. Most of the titles seem so much alike, they blur into a cloud of sameness. But as Leadership Editor Fred Allen and I were combing through the recent arrivals, two books stood out from the tilting piles and grabbed our attention: Mother Teresa, CEO: Unexpected Principles for Practical Leadership by Ruma Bose and Louis Faust, and Mob Rules, What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman by Louis Ferrante. Could these books have anything in common?

In Mother Teresa, CEO, Bose recounts the period in 1992 that she spent in Calcutta, volunteering with the Missionaries of Charity. Now co-CEO of Sprayology, a Tinton Falls, New Jersey maker of homeopathic remedies and vitamins, Bose had been fixated on Mother Theresa as a child growing up outside Montreal. At age 19, Bose traveled to India and volunteered at the “motherhouse,” before finishing college and embarking on a career in business. You might say Louis Ferrante had the opposite career path. He volunteered to join the Gambino crime family, spent years cracking safes, heisting trucks and supervising his own crew, before serving eight and a half years in prison. (He already published one book about that experience, Unlocked: The Life and Times of a Mafia Insider.)

While Bose offers just eight leadership principles, Ferrante has come up with a staggering 88 lessons he says he learned from the Mob. Still, the two authors offer a few pieces of advice in common. For instance, Bose’s third principal, “Wait! Then pick your moment.” According to Bose, Mother Teresa experienced numerous “aha” flashes, including a call from God while she was on her way to a Darjeeling retreat, and a time in the city of Kalighat, where she found a woman dying on the sidewalk and was inspired to open a home there. Bose advises that leaders need to consider “three linked categories,” emotional, financial and operational. Though she doesn’t offer details, Bose says Mother Teresa had not only faith but a fundraising plan, and an organization to handle administrative chores.

The parallel in Ferrante’s book: Lesson 2, “It’s the Principle! When to Make a Point.” Ferrante tells the story of a restaurant owner who was well past overdue on his payments to a bookie. Though the restaurateur was finally ready to make good on his debt, the bookie had his associates wreck the restaurant because, writes Ferrante, “it was best to have a reputation as a businessman who stands on principle.” Well, maybe this lesson is a little different from Mother Teresa’s, but both Ferrante and Bose believe in the importance of good timing.

Perhaps Ferrante’s “when to make a point” lesson is more like Bose’s second principle, “Deal with the devil in order to get to the angels.” She describes how Mother Teresa accepted funds from some notorious sources, like “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti and from former Lincoln Savings and Loan CEO Charles Keating, who donated more than $1 million. “Mother Teresa’s angels were the poorest of the poor,” writes Bose, “and her goal was to serve them. To do that, she needed people and money.” Bose is a little foggy on whether she thinks there’s ever a place to draw the line when it comes to funding sources. When he was in the Mafia, Ferrante clearly thought it was fine to deal with devils to make a business point.

One more parallel between the two books: Bose’s fifth principle, “discover the joy of discipline.” Mother Teresa arose every morning at 4:40, attended mass and then got down to work. She kept up a grueling schedule of international travel, visiting her 600 missions around the world. Bose is a little foggy on just how Mother Teresa managed to multi-task (“Her mantra was: If something needs washing wash it… If something needed to get done immediately, she just did it.”), except that Mother Teresa apparently found “joy” in everything she did.

Ferrante likes discipline too, as he spells out in Lesson 44, “Seize the bull by the horns—and rip off his balls: the fast and decisive leader.” To make his point about decisiveness, he tells the violent story of how Lucky Luciano seized the opportunity to have his rival Salvatore Maranzano assassinated. Luciano had gotten a tip that Maranzano was going to be investigated by IRS agents; he dispatched a crew who carried phony government badges and, as Ferrante writes, the “audit became an autopsy.”

OK, so maybe the discipline parallel is a stretch. Or perhaps lesson 44 is more like Bose’s principle 6, “communicate in a language people understand.” Writes Bose, “through focused attention, active listening, and adaptation, Mother Teresa consistently spoke in a language that her listeners understood.” Luciano was certainly focused when he made the decision to off Maranzano, and the language of violence is arguably crystal clear.

That’s about it for commonalities between these two books. Like so many tomes in the leadership genre, these two are really just excuses for the authors to write about subjects they favor, with the leadership lessons or principles tagged on to try to sell the stories to advice-hungry readers. Mother Teresa may be a laudable subject, but the Bose book is the inferior of the two. The author offers no real insight into how Mother Teresa built her phenomenal organization. Bose’s co-author, Louis Faust, III, a former investment and software executive, seems tacked onto the book to lend some added legitimacy, but instead his stories are jarring, like an anecdote about how Faust used to keep a “Quote Book” of accidentally funny things his employees said, in the chapter about how Mother Teresa found joy in her tireless schedule of traveling around the world ministering to the sick and dying.

Ferrante’s book is worth a read less for the leadership lessons than for the colorful tales of mob life. He might have done better simply to write a sequel to his first volume. Too often this book lacks a tie-in between the striking anecdote and the supposed business lesson. For instance, lesson 46, “we shot him twelve times and he lived: most problems take care of themselves,” describes a failed attempt to assassinate a mob member who was suspected of “going sour.” The hit men filled the victim with a dozen bullets, but the man not only lived, but thrived. The hit men went to prison, and the “problem” remained. Where’s the leadership lesson? Who knows, but it’s a good story.

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